Deeplinks Blog posts about Content Blocking

This week's news roundup takes us to Iran, where censorship is getting worse, Turkey, where it might be getting better, and Zimbabwe, where a blogger is under threat.

Iran sets out to build ‘national Internet’

Iran already ranks amongst the world’s worst when it comes to online censorship. The country's censors target a variety of content, including political opposition, human rights and news sites, and a range of 'offensive' sites.

This week saw two disappointing decisions by two major American companies, Microsoft and Cisco, that appear to be choosing to become little tech helpers to China's repressive regime rather than choosing to be a force for good. For Cisco, it's more of the same. For Microsoft, it's a disappointing turn.

In Pakistan, where substantial online and offline censorship already exist, reports have emerged that users of the ISP Mobilink must add proxy 10.215.2.32 port 3128 to browse the Internet, resulting in censorship of key words and phrases in search engines, as well as several individual web pages, mostly related to Balochistan.

According to Shahzad Ahmad at the OpenNet Initiative, “Mobilink’s new filtering system will directly affect a large portion of Pakistan’s online community, which comprises 17 percent of the country’s population, or around 28 million people.”

Ahmad also notes that there is “no public knowledge of new legislation” that would have caused Mobilink to implement the new filtering.

Starting next month, the vast majority of Australia’s Internet users will find their access censored, following a decision by the country’s two largest providers--Telstra and Optus--as well as two smaller ISPs (itExtreme and Webshield), to voluntarily block more than 500 websites from view.

The decision from the two ISPs comes after numerous failed attempts by the Australian government to set up a centralized filtering plan.

Canadian company Netsweeper produces filtering software that is utilized by several countries to block web sites across various categories. In Yemen, popular blogging site Tumblr is blocked, due to Netsweeper’s categorization of the site as “pornographic.”

Similarly, a number of U.S. companies, including McAfee SmartFilter, Websense, and Cisco, produce software used by foreign governments to block and censor websites. So far, no policy exists to prevent the export of such products.

In a recent article in the Toronto Star, Netsweeper spokesperson Scott O’Neill stated that the company has a “no comment policy” regarding its use by foreign governments.